poetry

In anticipation of her up-coming campus reading, I sat down with poet and esteemed UP alum, Sarah Bokich, to learn a bit more about her, her newest chapbook, and life after UP. You can peruse our exchange below. Come hear Sarah read from her newest publication on Thursday, February 8th at 7:30pm in the Campus Bookstore. Hope to see you all there.

KG: Can you tell me a little bit about your recent collection of poems, The Rocking Chair at the End of the World?

SB: While a few of these poems were from an earlier period, the majority I wrote between 2012-2016. I had a lot going on during those years—I experienced a major loss, got married, and gave birth to my daughter. These experiences drastically changed my worldview and I wrote to process it all.

KG: Which works of literature have been particularly formative or moving for you as a poet? In a similar vein, was there a particular source from which you derived your inspiration for this chapbook?

SB: My favorite poet of all time is Philip Levine, who had such a genius for characterizing the subjects of his poems. I also like his use of plain language, with sudden brilliant and memorable lines interspersed. For this particular collection, I also drew a lot on Silvia Plath who so deeply experienced the complexities of motherhood.

KG: Prior to contacting you, I was reading some of the pieces you’ve had published in various publications. I really enjoyed the two-part series, “What Will Happen to the Men.” Both pieces are important and powerful, I was curious to know if there was an event perhaps (or a life full of events, possibly) that acted as the catalyst for such a series?

SB: There is a lot more anger and intensity in the poems I’ve written recently. Some of it comes from getting older and feeling more comfortable with expressing myself and pushing back against a male-dominated culture and workplace, and some of it is in reaction to our current political climate, where an anti-woman sentiment is so prevalent.

KG: Additionally, one of the poems that you graciously allowed us to preview from The Rocking Chair at the End of the World, titled “Trading the Animals” was really interesting. Tell me about writing that piece, your process and specific inspiration if there was any.

SB: This poem was based on a story I heard on NPR. A reporter did a piece about zoos and how they can’t buy and sell animals—they have to trade them. The trade of puffins for a Komodo dragon is a real thing from that story. I ended up taking on the persona of the zookeeper to write the poem.

KG: Being a successful UP graduate, is there any advice you can impart on the creatively inclined or potential future poets at UP?

SB: It is totally possible to integrate creative endeavors into your life after graduation! Poetry isn’t my profession—I’ve been in the tech industry for nearly a decade— but writing is a consistent part of my life that has afforded me some incredible experiences and friendships. Whether you take a workshop, read at a local open mic, or submit to one of our wonderful regional publications, there are a myriad of ways to participate in Portland’s rich literary community. I co-host an open mic at the Attic Institute on Hawthorne the first Friday of every month and would love to see some UP writers there!

Last November, Elyse Fenton came to University of Portland to read from her wildly acclaimed poetry book Clamor. Her collection caught literary fire after she was not only the first American author to win the University of Wales’ Dylan Thomas Prize, but also the first poet. She’s been interviewed on NPR and BBC. After her reading at the University of Portland Bookstore, she was offered an adjunct position for Fall 2016 teaching the poetry workshop class offered every other year.

Sitting down next to me at the Pilot House, Professor Fenton smiled and explained she was going to go running after our interview, hence her jogging attire. I asked how her Halloween went. “Great,” she replied, “I went as ‘bigly,’ a play on how Donald Trump says ‘big league.’”

Her experience teaching here has been unique, she said. “UP students are the most enthusiastic group of students I’ve taught. They’re willing to try new things and get out of their comfort zones.” As one of these students, I take that as a great compliment.

After living in Massachusetts, Texas, and even Mongolia, Fenton chose Portland to settle down with her family. But just because she’s a transplant doesn’t mean that she isn’t familiar with West Coast antics; she got her B.A. from Reed College and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon.

Fenton is not only a writer, mother, and professor, but also a high school career counselor. All these identities make for one great resource for students pursuing a writing career but don’t know where to start. I picked her brain for advice and she said what every other teacher has been saying since I can remember: read and write. “Writing is a spectrum, not a vacuum. Be influenced!” She also said that writing only ever gets done when you schedule it. “Prioritize your writing life. Call yourself a writer. Believe in your work enough to put it out there.” Fenton says she balances seasons of writing with periods of PR work, an important aspect if you want to be published. “I accept that I won’t get as much writing done in the summer and use that time to edit and publish.”

Fenton’s second book of poetry, Sweet Insurgent, is scheduled to come out early next year, so keep your eyes peeled. And after gaining significant recognition in the poetry world, Fenton is now moving on to a new project: her first novel. Fenton said that switching genres can give an author perspective about their past, present, and future work. It also allows her to access different languages and ways of writing. Because she received help with Clamor from critics and peers, she categorizes this first work as a “typical” writing process. She decided to go about her second literary work differently, working on her new novel alone. But she doesn’t forget the help she’s received, saying, “I still keep those voices in my head.”

Professor Fenton is invaluable to the University of Portland community, and we’re extremely lucky that she shares her insights and experience. Her current poetry workshop class, ENG 306, is dynamic, fun, and creative. Her laid-back persona encourages a comfortable environment for deep conversations and writing workshops, a difficult task that seems natural to her.

Check out Fenton’s website for more information about her and her work.

Her work in her poetry collection Another Sunset We Survive and in her first novel Carry the Sky explores the rhythms of water and rowing, the personal and impersonal erasure of queer and female identities, and the beauty and strength found in the relationships that carry us through the violence and traumas that fracture our lives.

In addition to her writing, Kate has taught extensively, from college students to women’s writing residencies to workshops for women inmates. Kate was kind enough to explore her work and process with us in this brief but candid interview.

In Another Sunset We Survive fishing and rowing appear again and again, as does water in many forms. What is your history with these activities, and what brings you back to them in your writing? What places do they evoke for you?

At Williams College I rowed competitively, and when I came to Portland in my twenties, I continued competing for another 15 years. Many of the poems in that collection were written for an Oregon Literary Arts grant: to write a series of poems placed along the route I rowed every morning on the Willamette River. Rowing is part sport, part religion. While matching the stroke of others, you transcend and become part of a force much larger than yourself. Fishing and rowing provide bountiful metaphors, and the physicality of each evokes rhythms enhancing the meanings. Traditional forms like the villanelle match the repetitive nature of those sports, and the contemporary use of tradition forms with untraditional topics, like AIDS (in “Catch and Release”), creates a tension that I hope calls tradition into question.

Your new book, tentatively titled Any More, Black Shoe, “imagines the intersecting lives of Sylvia Plath and Maureen Buckley, younger sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1953.” Your poem Dear Sir, Comma appears to evoke a Maureen Buckley-esque figure, living in the radius of “a pundit launching conservative reform in language / and politics.” How long have you wanted to tell this story and what turns has it taken along the way? Has anything about it surprised you?

Great question. My mother was Bill Buckley’s next older sister and worked for him answering his mail, the topic of the poem you cite. I grew up listening to her call out punctuation and defend his vocabulary in letters to his readers. She read her responses into a tape recorder for a secretary in New York to transcribe. When I was sixteen, my mother dropped on my desk a copy of Letters Home, the collection of letters Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, in which Plath wrote about attending my Aunt Maureen’s debutant party at my grandparents’ home in 1950. My mother said, “Read this. That’s how it was.” The letter contained a fairy-tale description of my family’s home. Plath and my aunt were in the same dorm at Smith for two years. My Aunt Maureen died of natural causes when I was four, a year after Plath suicided, and so, I never knew either of them. This story has been in my body for a very long time, the story of two smart, attractive, vivacious young women in the 1950s who made very different choices, and I started researching it more than ten years ago. Because poetry is my first language, I had to learn how to write fiction; the story requires a bigger bucket than a poem. I abandoned my first attempts in order to tell my own story in Carry the Sky, make whatever mistakes I needed to make in order to tell the bigger story of young women growing up in the rarified world with 1950s’ strictures. The surprises keep coming, especially in the scenes or moments I’ve imagined which I find to be historically true or possible.

Beyond your writing, you have a great deal of experience teaching and volunteering. For many young writers, the idea of teaching often feels both daunting and inevitable, but how might you describe your experiences in teaching (and teaching writing) and how have these experiences informed your own writing?

Every liberal arts graduate faces teaching as both daunting and inevitable (your great words). For me teaching and writing were complementary. Sure, I lamented the 9-month sprint of the academic year in which every moment is spent grading and preparing, but within the teaching, I learned so much about writing. I could read and teach writers I loved, dig deeply into their backgrounds, techniques, and publications in order to wear their shoes. Or at least, admire their shoes. After a few years as a full-time instructor, I was able to manage time, by getting up at 5am to write for an hour or two, before grading papers and getting to campus (after I stopped rowing). And working within academia gave me the impetus and the funds to attend conferences, workshops, and residencies. And best of all, students showed me the impact of great stories on them and honored me with their stories. Little helps a writer more than listening, providing a safe place for the stories to rise.

Kate Gray will be reading at the UP Bookstore, Wednesday October 5th, 7:30pm.

In a short poem entitled “Endurance,” Elyse Fenton writes: “I used to stand in doorways and know / there was no human way to go on or through” (46). This poem, along with so many others reverently bound in Clamor, captures a deep human emotion not easily put into words. Fenton’s poetry engages with something intrinsically human, deeply emotional, easy to connect to but not easy to articulate. Because Clamor was written during her husband’s deployment in Iraq, Fenton describes it as something that just happened:

I say “it happened” because that’s how the writing felt. It was happening, whether I liked it or not (and often, admittedly, I did not). It was happening on the blank computer screen when I wrote in the mornings before teaching or running or dithering around in my garden or going to class. And it was happening in the occasional phone calls I had with my husband, in the instant messages, in all the communication we had or failed to have across that year.

Like life, like emotion, this was a book of poetry that seemed to demand to be written, and for the reader, it just as importantly demands to be felt.

I was given the chance to interview Fenton before her upcoming talk on the 17th of this month. Reading from Clamor, a winner of the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, Fenton gives students and others the golden opportunity to hear the poems through the poet’s voice. I asked Fenton for a description of her book, and her response, full of beauty, captured the book in the way only the author could:

“Clamor” is one of those words that means its own opposite. It means both noise and silence, and it means protest. I was the wife of a soldier living in the most homogeneously liberal pacifist echo chamber I’ve ever lived in (and that’s saying something). It was a fraught and anxious and squirmy and sometimes terrible and highly productive time. The book that came of it, I think, enacts that tension: there’s a speaker bashing up against the limits of language, and finding some kind of solace in that failure. Which might be another way of saying, the book’s full of elegies.

As a reader, I saw this tension most prominently in the ever changing of format of the poems in the book. Separated into three sections, the first and third sections follow a more traditional poem format, while section two is full of prose poems. When asked about this changing format, Fenton responded:

As the poet, as the one instigating the bashing I tried a lot of different approaches. The prose poems in the middle, the more exploded lyrics, the couplets, the tercets, there’s a broken sonnet or two in there… When I first put the book together, I wasn’t sure what to do with all that variety, but then I understood it for what it was: clamor, all of it.

And clamor it is, protesting the traditional while giving voice to the unspoken, giving the reader a chance for the peaceful silence that comes in the wake of the articulation of pure feeling. This book of poetry has depth and beauty and so many layers that with each new layer you un-earth, the greater your appreciation for Fenton and her poetry grows. She makes music with the noise of emotion. She describes the writing of this book as throwing

[A] lot at the page to see what would stick, what would wound, what would edge me closer to or farther away from…I want to say ‘understanding’ here, but it was more like relief. What would edge me closer to relief, to the discovery that what was music was also just noise. And of course, the other way around.

Simultaneously a wound and a bandage, relief and distraction, hope and despair, music and noise, Clamor offers a look into the life of a wife of a soldier, but also a look into emotions that each human, regardless of station and location, struggles to find the words for. If you have the opportunity, take an hour out of your day and come listen to Fenton on November17th: the evening’s reading offers more than just the chance to listen to wonderful poetry.